


Thunder only happens when it's raining

by MuddlingAlong



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: F/F, Internal Monologue, Introspection, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 20:32:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18147086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuddlingAlong/pseuds/MuddlingAlong
Summary: Players only love you when they're playingSome Charity introspection because who doesn't love that?





	Thunder only happens when it's raining

**Author's Note:**

> Charity is such an interesting character to me, I could spend hours exploring her psychology I swear. This is just one long extended metaphor with not much actual Vanity, but I'm trying to empty my drafts folder, so you're stuck with it I'm afraid
> 
> xx

Charity knows how to play the game. Life gets too messy, she flicks the ‘off’ switch on the Feelings Meter and plays it like she’s Player One and the consequences are paper money and kudos. Her life is the board, her options the hand she’s been dealt, her future mapped out in colourful little squares. Her choices are methodical and strategic, her gains perfectly calculated.

 

And she knows how to play it well. She is the expert in when and how to make each move, when to take the risk, when to hedge her bets. She can predict the moves of her opponents like she knows how to breathe, lives her life three, four, ten moves ahead of everyone else. Knows who to play, how to play them. No one knows this game better than Charity. 

 

She’s been playing it her whole life.

 

Her husband (the one she married for love) has a secret, perfect baby and breaks the pieces of her she’d so cautiously given him as if she’d had never meant anything to him. And so she presses the eject button on real life and enters survival mode. Plays the long game, wears her poker face while she’s making a complicated set of moves to have his secret, perfect, _fucking_ baby taken very very far away. Tactics.

 

Her husband (the one she married for that house on the hill) knows she lied to him. So she ducks and bluffs and double crosses as he follows her across the board, hands outstretched like Frankenstein’s monster, and when she realises she’s been completely and utterly cornered and her only move left is a big old whack on the head, she plays it.

 

There’s no room for a conscience, for feelings when you’re playing the game. Because they ruin everything, make you stupid and complacent and weak. You have to be cold in order to survive.

 

That’s the first rule that Charity learned when, at thirteen, blindly in love with her daughter, every single cell of her being tied to her baby held in someone else’s arms, that door closed with a slam that still wakes her up at night, with half of herself on the other side.

 

That was the first day she played the game for real.

 

She’s had to learn that over and over again: feelings get in the way. It doesn’t stop them seeping in to her brain somehow, even when she thinks she’s closed every crack, bricked every hole in the wall that keeps them separate. It’s the most important rule, and yet somehow it’s the one she keeps tripping over, the one that always brings her down. She fell for Jai, gave in to her mushy, beating heart, which was right where he stabbed her. She chases Cain down a thousand roads as her soul seems to yearn for him, and then he turns round and tears her to shreds where she stands every single time.

 

There’s no room for feelings. There’s no room for anything apart from a survival instinct and a set of tricks.

 

Which is partly why Vanessa Woodfield is so bloody annoying. 

 

Because she won’t play. 

 

Charity riles her up, disorientates her, twirls her round on the end of her finger, she plays hard to get and then pulls a one-eighty with a _quickie round the back, babe?_. (Predicted move: get flustered, come running, have sex). But Vanessa tells her to stop playing games, tells her they’re too old for anything apart from honesty, and she walks away.

 

Charity, full of shame, panic, guilt, all those _feelings_ that make you weak, pretends to have shagged _some bloke_ , taunts her with it, toys him right under her nose. (Predicted move: get angry, get upset, leave.) But Vanessa sees right through it, speaks _Charity code_ and says she’ll stay, tells her she’s amazing. She winds her life through Charity’s like she belongs there.

 

Charity gets drunk and destructive. (Predicted move: get annoyed, get shouty, leave). And Vanessa waits patiently, a hand in her hair, says she _understands._

 

But Charity doesn’t know how to deal with that. None of her rules work anymore. How do you play someone who won’t join in? 

 

And not only does Vanessa not want to play the game, but she somehow sees through the pretence in every single move of Charity’s. She knows that hands round her waist and breath on her neck often mean that really what’s needed is a cup of tea and a listening ear. That harsh words and insults are just the veil behind which lies vulnerability, fear and self-loathing. That she’s playing a game at all.

 

And it’s enthralling.

 

It’s enthralling and dangerous and scary and Charity is more addicted to this than she ever was to scams and seduction. 

 

And there’s another thing to contend with. Since early on, she’s found it more and more difficult to hide from her feelings. The cracks in her walls are opening too fast to close up again, her ’off’ switch just won’t work any more. Something soft and tender has begun to bloom somewhere in her chest, in the place she swore no one would ever reach again.

 

Part of her, the part that is still thirteen years old and half empty, is terrified. Because she’s breaking the most important rule, the one she made that very first day, and this time it’s worse because she’s fallen harder and deeper than she ever has before. Which can only be perilous.

 

But another part of her feels safe for the first time in her life. When she’s in Vanessa’s arms at the end of the day, when she sees those two plastic toothbrushes side by side, when she wakes to see blonde strewn across the pillow next to her, she feels a spread of contentment she’s never allowed herself to feel.

 

“Charity?” There it is, that voice, that hand on her arm, that _tenderness_ , so soft it hurts. She’s concerned. Charity feels that concern, feels it felt for her and it simultaneously terrifies her and comforts her. “You OK?”

 

She rolls over in the bed, mattress springs complaining. Those blue eyes are waiting for her, full of a love she’s learning to accept, learning to write into her limbs like a tonic, even if it isn’t spoken aloud yet.

 

“Yeah, babe, just thinking,” she smiles, a smile so gentle and loving she feels her muscles creak. Vanessa returns it, kisses her once, softly, and nestles herself against Charity’s chest, an arm draped protectively round her waist. For a second, Charity freezes. 

 

It scares her, how right this feels. It scares her that one day she’ll wake up and this will all be gone, and it will all be her fault because she put the rulebook down and stopped looking ahead.

 

It scares her that one day she might roll over and those blue eyes won’t be there.

 

Because this love thing, it’s a whole new game with rules she doesn’t know and consequences that are so much bigger and much scarier than _return to square 1._

 

Vanessa breathes out a deep breath against her breast and her eyes flutter closed. The slumber, the peaceful quiet steals over them without Charity realising, and she relaxes, completely.

 

But the rewards, the _rewards_ are worth it. 

 

Some days she thinks she’d risk it all for a smile.

 

Most days, she does.


End file.
